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Katherine Johnson’s mathematical calculations helped guide some of America’s most important early space missions while she confronted the racial and gender barriers faced by Black women in twentieth-century America.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
Ali Ahmad Muhammad Al Rahizi (Arabic: علي أحمد محمد أل رهيز) is a Yemeni prisoner who was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba. His Guantanamo Internment Serial Number is 45. Joint Task Force Guantanamo counter-terrorism analysts reports he was born on October 13, 1979, in Taiz, Yemen. He was one of the first twenty Guantanamo captives, sent there on January 11, 2002, and called "the worst of the worst". Guantanamo analysts characterized him as one of the "Dirty Thirty". In 2009, he was classified as a "forever prisoner"—an individual for whom there was no evidence they had committed a war crime, who, nevertheless, was considered too dangerous to release. A Periodic Review Board hearing, in April 2014, reversed this determination. He was transferred to the United Arab Emirates on November 16, 2015, with four other Yemenis. He was repatriated to Yemen on 27 October 2021.
The United States Department of Defense acknowledges holding Tunisian detainees in Guantanamo. A total of 779 detainees have been held in extrajudicial detention in the Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba since the camps opened on January 11, 2002 The camp population peaked in 2004 at approximately 660. Only nineteen new detainees, all "high value detainees" have been transferred there since the United States Supreme Court's ruling in Rasul v. Bush. As of January 6, 2025, 15 detainees remain at Guantanamo Bay. By July 2012 the camp held 168 captives. On February 24, 2010, Carol Rosenberg, of the Miami Herald, reported that Albania accepted the transfer of three former detainees, a Tunisian, Saleh Bin Hadi Asasi and Sharif Fati Ali al Mishad and Rauf Omar Mohammad Abu al Qusin, an Egyptian, and a Libyan. The men will not be allowed to leave Albania. On July 27, 2012, Tunisia Live asserted the five remaining Tunisian captives would be repatriated by the end of 2012. Previously, the risk of torture under the Ben Ali regime meant the five Tunisian detainees could not safely return home. Now, with Tunisia's democratic transition in full effect, there is nothing to prevent these Tunisian citizens returning to their country.
Factual returns are documents a government has to file in response to habeas corpus petitions. Habeas corpus is a legal tool in the English tradition of justice, dating back to Magna Carta, prohibiting arbitrary arrest and detention. Captives are entitled to file a writ of habeas corpus before a judge, requiring the state to offer a justification for his or her detention.
Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi (Arabic: مصطفى احمد ادم الهوساوي; born August 5, 1968) is a Saudi Arabian citizen. He is alleged to have acted as a key financial facilitator for the September 11 attacks in the United States. Mustafa al-Hawsawi was captured in Pakistan by Pakistani agents in March 2003 and was transferred to the custody of the United States. He was held in secret CIA black sites until September 2006, when he was transferred to Guantánamo Bay and U.S. officials finally acknowledged his imprisonment. It detained him at the Salt Pit, a secret black site in Afghanistan. It was reported in August 2010 that, after months of interrogation, the CIA transferred al-Hawsawi and three other high-value detainees to Guantanamo Bay detention camp on September 24, 2003, for indefinite detention. Fearing that Rasul v. Bush, a pending Supreme Court case about detainees' habeas corpus rights, might result in having to provide the men with access to counsel, the CIA took back custody on March 27, 2004, and transported the four men to one of their black sites. It has long been known that, during al-Hawsawi's CIA captivity, his captors injured him, causing him to suffer from anal fissures, chronic hemorrhoids and, most seriously, symptomatic rectal prolapse. When the United States Senate Intelligence Committee published a 600-page unclassified summary of its 6,000-page report on the CIA's use of torture, the world learned that the CIA routinely punished its captives by sodomizing them, claiming the sodomy was the long abandoned medical technique of rectal feeding. The United States Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation of the CIA's Torture Program revealed that detainees were routinely subjected to unnecessary rectal exams without evidence of medical necessity for purposes of behavioral control. CIA leadership, including General Counsel Scott Muller and DDO James Pavitt, were alerted to allegations that rectal exams were conducted with "excessive force" on two detainees at the Salt Pit detention site. CIA records indicate that one of the detainees, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, was later diagnosed with chronic hemorrhoids, an anal fissure, and symptomatic rectal prolapse. Al-Hawsawi was transferred from CIA custody to military custody at Guantanamo on September 6, 2006. The Bush administration was then confident of the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which restricted detainee use of habeas corpus, and prohibited them from using the federal court system (this provision was, however, ruled unconstitutional in Boumediene v. Bush (2008), and numerous habeas corpus petitions were refiled in the federal courts). Al-Hawsawi remains incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay. On July 31, 2024, Al-Hawsawi agreed to plead guilty to avoid the death penalty. His plea deal was revoked by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin two days later.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →The Greenwood District.